This is a review by Rodney Noon of a book co-written by myself, Julie Doughty and Paul Magrath. It originally appeared in Nagalro’s Seen & Heard (Vol 29, Issue 1, 2019) and is reproduced with kind permission. 

When selecting books for review, it has been my policy to filter the lists by asking, ‘Is this a book which might justify a place on a practitioner’s bookshelves?’ Since receiving the review copy of this comprehensive exposition by my predecessor at the helm of Seen and Heard, the Chair of the Transparency Project and counsel at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales, I have twice reached for it and twice found the answer. It is difficult to offer a practitioner’s text higher praise.

The issue of transparency within the Family Court and Court of Protection is very current and subject to rapid developments. Since this book was published, we have seen the advent of facilities for legal bloggers to attend hearings int he family court. It would have been wonderful if everything could have been gathered up into a single, comprehensive piece of legislation and a dedicated part in the Family Procedure Rules, so that when an issue suddenly ambushed a practitioner from the dark corner of a file, they would know where all the rules were to be found. Sadly, that is not what has happened.

The rules are found scattered across a range of (Sometimes obscure) pieces of legislation, diverse parts of the rules and a range of judgments. It is a tribute to the thoroughness with which the authors have approached their task that they have managed to gather all the scattered pieces together and to form them into something resembling a comprehensible whole. It is no fault of the authors that there are places where the bits just do not fit. Pieces of different statutes point in different directions and two judges have taken different approaches to the same issue. It is to the authors’ credit that they do not shy away from these problems; instead they explain the contradictions, describing the world as it is, not as we might like it to be.

This is not an academic text book. It is written for practitioners to tell them clearly where to find the right rules and what they actually say. I was particularly impressed by the helpful section about monitoring social media and how to get things removed.

Whether lawyer or social worker, we all need to understand the changes which are happening within the environment in which we practice. We would all be better practitioners for carefully reading this book.

Rodney Noon is a Solicitor-Advocate, Bradford, W Yorks.

By the way, you can purchase the book with a 15% discount by using the code BPTFC15 (see link).